Catching up with progress in the Money Gallery

Catherine Eagleton, curator, British Museum

It’s now a couple of months since the last blog post – so much has been going on that we haven’t had time to write anything about it all. Sometimes, when I talk to friends outside the museum sector, they are surprised at how long major exhibition or gallery projects seem to take, but when you’re working on one of these projects, you see the number and range of things that there are to do.

At the moment, there is hoarding up in what will become The Citi Money Gallery, and behind there, the cases have all been emptied, and the walls and ceiling have been repainted. Next, there’s work to do on cabling and other basic infrastructure, before we start to install the new displays. Before the scaffolding came down, I made sure I went up to the top, touched the ceiling, and took this picture.

The view above the hoardings

At the same time, the final work is being done on the design of the gallery, including the layout of objects in the cases, and the text that will go with them. With so many specialist curators involved, each piece of text has to be edited, and checked, and re-checked, to make sure we have every detail right. Then, the text and images all go to our graphic designer to create the panels and labels for the new displays. As I write, we are expecting the first proofs of the panels to arrive, which means that it starts to feel like the new gallery is nearly ready to be installed.

The objects aren’t being neglected either, and the team of Museum Assistants in the Department of Coins and Medals are busy checking all the object lists, and getting all the objects ready for display. This preparation involves every object being individually checked by one of the Museum’s conservation team to make sure it’s in good enough condition to go on permanent display, as well as so they can advise on how objects are mounted. With more than 1000 to check, this is a big job.

It’s amazing sometimes what a gallery curator gets involved with – from paint colour choices to deep discussions about how to ensure consistency in our use of ancient place names, and from climbing scaffolding to talking about whether a plastic object would deteriorate if it was on display for five years. I’ll be talking more about this to the next generation of museum curators at a Museum Studies day in March, which I’m very excited about.

The Money Gallery project is supported by Citi and opens in June 2012.

Its really wonderful to see a behind the scenes picture. I actually used this today to inspire my kids to think about what happens behind the scenes at the British Museum! As a former museum curator my eldest boy is familiar with some of the practical stuff in a smaller museum and is very familiar with the galleries at the BM and it was really useful to show him what goes into putting on an exhibition on a bigger scale. We plan to make our own mini exhibitions at the weekend now. Thanks, more of this please :)